Volunteers needed to make 2025 oral history videos with disabled charity founder

The Carmarthenshire based charity, SEE around Britain, has a multilingual photographic travel website/app that has over 50,000 venues at https://seearoundbritain.com/ and is aimed at everybody, the resident and tourist, and also those with special needs

Some of these have full, and others abridged, descriptions as we are keen to get more venues onto the website and urgently need more volunteers to write full descriptions, and survey their local venues.

To give a snapshot of life in 2025, we will be making bilingual oral history videos about the venues and activities such as choirs and bands in their local villages and towns, including those who lived through the Second World War, and the Blitz bombing in Pembroke, Swansea and Cardiff. These videos would then be a permanent lasting record on our website/app.

Volunteers can get free training from Carmarthenshire Association of Voluntary Services (CAVS) in Carmarthen and free parking would be available for this in the adjacent County Hall car park.

These videos would be the forerunner to our charity doing a similar approach with over a dozen leading members of Welsh public life each show him around their hometowns or villages. This includes Michael Sheen, Karl Jenkins and Tanni Grey Thompson.

Our founder trustee, Marg McNiel, first photographed venues in black-and-white in the 1950s and

60s, and then updating with colour photographs, before replacing these with a comprehensive amount of digital photographs.

His survey work has been arduous as he was born with a mobility impairment and since 1992 he has had ME, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, a neurological and muscular disease that affects all his body systems so he is like an ‘environmental canary’ and this informs his coverage of conditions at each venue.

It also gives him only 4 hours sleep at night leaving him each day feeling ‘constantly jetlagged’.

He is an Irish citizen and his unusual first name Marg or Margr is Norse as his parents families are from County Cork and the Hebrides.

He has spent a lifetime in community and heritage education travelling throughout Europe on a shoestring doing his survey work without any public funding, and has taken over 500,000 photos to help others with what to expect when they travel to a new venue.

His aim is to give skeleton coverage for more people to add to. It can include everyday things like pharmacies, clinics, hospitals, libraries, post offices and other shops.

In 1974 he contracted a rare vomiting and respiratory virus in Europe, which developed into life-threatening acute double pneumonia, which left him with post viral fatigue for over a year.

If you are interested please email explaining a bit about yourself to support@seearoundbritain.com